Soft Tracking With SynthEyes

Recently Andersson Technologies pushed out an update to SynthEyes, that included some new tools to assist with tracking and working with 3D meshes. These new tools also make it possible for soft tracking. Soft tracking is where you can accurately track things that deform over time, such as a persons face.

how to make generic geometry, fit any actor’s head in SynthEyes.

This is exactly what Matthew Merkovich shows how to do in his latest tutorial. SynthEyes added a smudge tool. The new tool will allow you to edit a 3D mesh in SynthEyes to better match the shot that you are working on.

One you have “hard tracked” a 3d object into a shot, you can do a bit of soft tracking to the mesh to better fit the changing features from frame to frame. The Smudge Tool works on the boundary level of a mesh in SynthEyes, or its interior, making it perfect for soft tracking type of work.

Matthew Merkovich shows how to achieve a hard track first, and conform a generation 3D head model using the Smudge Tool. He then shows how to handle the secondary tracking on deforming shapes in the shot.

The generic meshes are actually created using MakeHuman, and Blender, but the same principles would apply to any generic head geometry you happen to have as well.